Twansparency

[Dave Birch] There’s an interesting post over at Virtual Economics. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit about it since I read it. It’s about adding a new convention to Twittering to help when people tweet about companies:

There’s already an agreed taxonomy for doing so – you take the ticker of the company, and precede it with a dollar sign. Thus Google is $GOOG, Apple is $AAPL, Microsoft is $MSFT. Search for postings about Google by sticking $GOOG into the search box and you get a page like this… So we need a way to add disclosures to tweets about companies, preferably one that doesn’t take up too much space and allows for some nuance.

The post is asking for a similarly simple taxonomy for letting readers know if you are posting about a company that you have an interest in and it proposes a logical, but too complicated set.

I commented: Actually, I think you’re probably right, although we need something simpler. I’ve got two ideas. There certainly ought to be a common mark for “my company provides paid services or products to the company that is the subject of this tweet”. Perhaps “@$”? So I might write “I see that @$VISA has announced their in2Pay product today” as distinct from “I see that $VISA has announced…”. There also needs to be a simple taxonomy for “I have a financial interest in the company that is the subject of this tweet. So perhaps “%” followed by the twitter name of the company. Thus I might write that %@chyppings is doing some ground-breaking work on mass-market NFC services, instead of the more neural @chyppings.

This seems like a simple and desirable element of transparency that would add to the twitter experience.